


this crooked line

by KelpietheThundergod



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Implied Castiel/Dean Winchester, M/M, Post-Episode s10e06 Ask Jeeves, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 15:45:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3295922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KelpietheThundergod/pseuds/KelpietheThundergod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean runs.</p><p> </p><p>It’s a dream, of course, but it’s the same every night.</p><p>Ever since he and Sam were in the Lacroix house, Dean goes to sleep at night and wakes up in that attic.</p><p>It always starts out the same – he is not alone. Olivia is there, the dead Colette at her feet. She has a stuffed dog in her arms, and is crying, screaming at him, angry, “It’s a choice”, over and over.</p><p>She never stops, whatever he says. He moves away from her and through the attic then, searching for a quiet place. The door is not where it’s supposed to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this crooked line

**Author's Note:**

> the lines at the beginning are not my poetry but song lyrics from highlonesome - devil at the door

 

 

 

 

 

_the sun goes down,_

_it’s singing time_

_moving down that old crooked line_

_and the devil, he is at my door_

_can’t stall him, stay away no more_

 

 

 

 

Dean runs.

 

It’s a dream, of course, but it’s the same every night.

Ever since he and Sam were in the Lacroix house, Dean goes to sleep at night and wakes up in that attic.

It always starts out the same – he is not alone. Olivia is there, the dead Colette at her feet. She has a stuffed dog in her arms, and is crying, screaming at him, angry, “It’s a choice”, over and over.

She never stops, whatever he says. He moves away from her and through the attic then, searching for a quiet place. The door is not where it’s supposed to be. All the mirrors are shattered.

 

The first time he’s there, the first dream, he picks up a shard, carefully, instinctively reaching for a weapon, and it cuts his hand right down to the bone, which shines black right through his skin. It hurts so much, pain and shock a wave crashing him to his knees, but he doesn’t wake up. He never wakes up, until the end.

 

This night, he’s just come back from a solo hunt, smelling like blood all over. He showers, changes his clothes, exchanges a few meaningless words with Sam in the library. All that time, although his skin is scrubbed clean, the smell stays. It’s thick under his nose, like his very breath stinks of it, and it clings to the back of his mouth, wet and suffocating like river mud.

He goes to the kitchen for some water, but the taste of it in his mouth is so bitter, like rotting leaves, that he spits it out again immediately into the sink.

Barely sleeping and nightmares are nothing new. But this, it’s – different. It’s like he’s awake, but knows he dreams. He sleeps three, maybe four hours, but it feels like more, feels like much more. Like being trapped, and his fear is, every time, that one day he either won’t wake up or never sleep again.

 

Now, the eighth night in a row, Dean finally lies down at 2 in the morning, and the moment he closes his eyes, he’s there again, the attic.

Olivia screams at him, “It’s a choice!”, and her voice is so shrill, it hurts Dean’s teeth. He turns away from her. He never looks at Colette. Her face is strangely unclear, lost in the shadows, anyway. It’s kind of strange, since everything else in the attic is HD, colors bright and stabbing, all edges real and sharp under his hands.

But then again, everything here is strange.

 

After eight nights of the same, Dean should know the attic by heart, since all he does is run around the place, trying to escape Olivia’s voice, searching for the door. And Dean does know the place; in a way, it never actually changes. All the corners, the furniture, all the stuff cluttered around, it all stays the same, but the place changes around him, _moves_ with him – he can run, but he only ever comes back to Olivia, or gets stuck, staring at the smooth dark wall where the door should be.

 

 

 

 

>

 

Outside, in the real world, he doesn’t run.

He sleeps as little as possible, chucks coffee, looks for cases, and tries to never argue with Sam, which often leads to them not talking at all.

It’s not enough, of course not. It’s downright pathetic, actually, how little he achieves with how hard he tries. But his days are numbered, and he’s gotta make the best of it.

He likes to think he’s made his peace with it, that this is it, it’s over for him, and he’s gonna have to chin up and bury everything that he won’t have the time to atone for, won’t have the time to reach for.

In his nights though, he runs. A rat in a maze, driven by fear and anger alike, he wakes up, covered in sweat with his heart racing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

>

 

It’s shameful, and he always stays in bed until his body has quieted down, sleeves down to his wrists and eyes closed so he doesn’t have to see – _it_.

And it’s shameful, too, the way he’s scratching the walls of the attic at night, searching, desperate – what right has he to ask for freedom?

 

 

 

 

>

 

 

On this eighth night, when he falls asleep with a feeling like there’s still dirt clinging to his skin, seeping into his veins, he takes one of the mirror shards and stabs Olivia through the mouth, right into her brain. Like before, the shard cuts him too, a pain that would make him black out in an instant, if he were _outside_ , and not here.

Olivia drops to the ground, collapses over Colette in a twisted sort of embrace, but her words don’t stop. Dean can still hear them. He let’s the shard fall to the ground, where it shatters as if it hadn’t just cut through skin and bone like a knife through butter.

It’s another second until he realizes it’s his own voice, echoing, screaming, those very same words he’d tried to rip from Olivia’s lips, now stuffed down his own throat.

He wakes up then, finally. His mouth is open, he’s breathing erratically, but he isn’t screaming, like he was just seconds ago, in the attic. In fact, his throat is parched, and he has to cough and wet his lips several times, until he feels like he maybe has a voice at all.

He’s only slept two hours. The right side of his bed is empty. There’d be no one to talk to, anyway.

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

 

That day, he and Sam leave for a hunt in some muddy backwater town, only a few hours away. It’s a cold, rainy day, and one particularly miserable case. A girl’s gone missing, and ever since then, bodies been piling up, heartless. It’s a pretty safe bet that she’s been turned, but unlike Kate, she couldn’t take the strain, the fear, the hunger, and snapped.

Ever since he shot down Olivia – out _here_ , during the case, not in that cursed attic – Sam’s been giving him these worried sideways looks. He hasn’t tried to talk to Dean about it again, and that makes guilt churn in Dean’s gut, because Sam would have every right to.

 

After speaking with the devastated parents, who can’t tell them much more than that her daughter went into the woods one day and never came back, Sam checks back with the local law. Dean waits outside by the car, feeling inexplicably nervous about going inside, although the drizzle seeps through his FBI suit and right down to his skin, chilling, and sending shivers down his arms.

He can’t even remember the girl’s name; something complicated with C, he thinks. It’s a testament to how absent his head is, how tangled his thoughts, because he shouldn’t have trouble remembering this. It’s his job after all, to remember all these stories, all these innocents getting killed, his job to never let go of this.

Still, he keeps standing by the car, a cup of coffee in his hands that he doesn’t drink, that isn’t even warming his fingers, even though steam is rising off it into the cold air.

He stands there, and he should be thinking about the girl, the werewolf he’s probably going to have to kill, but instead his thoughts lap onto _something complicated with C_.

 

It’s nothing he talks about, and Sam, mercifully, doesn’t mention it either. There was pity in his eyes though, maybe confusion, the morning Dean woke up and – and what had Dean expected, really, after. After what he’d been.

 

There remains that selfish part of Dean, of course, that had ached to sway into Cas’ warmth, to just be held although it’d be the last thing he deserved. To have Cas kiss his throat, breathe Dean in, clutch him tightly.

Dean looks down at the cup in his hands, gone cold by now, and chucks it disgusted into the nearest trash can.

 

He crosses his arms over his chests, focuses on the familiar throbbing ache in in his arm. All this other – _stuff_ , it’s over now, far out of his reach.

 

 _Safe_ out of his reach.

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

 

It comes down to them tracking the girl down two towns over, in the woods, when it’s just getting dark. She’s sprawled down in the mud at Dean’s feet, but snarling, her eyes crazy, ready to attack. And then there’s a second – a second where her hair seems different in the fading light, and Dean feels the mirror shard cutting into his hand again, the black bone beneath, the blank wall under his fingertips.

She charges at him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

>  


Dean stabs her with the sliver knife, right through the heart, and then his arm just – keeps going. He plunges through her heart, her ribcage, her spine shatters, her flesh parts, and then his hand comes through on the other side, glistening red all over.

He stares at it, in a daze, a ringing in his ears that drowns out all other sounds.

The knife slips from his wet fingers, falls soundless among the soaked leaves. He rips his arm out of her corpse, stumbles back, crashes to his knees in front of her corpse.

 

He stares at it. It’s so still.

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

When Sam finds him, he’s already standing again, his jacket and shirt abandoned on the ground. But his arm is still red, he’s shaking all over, and the girl still has a hole through her middle.

“Dean,” his brother says, his voice pressed and far away. It seems like after that, he doesn’t know what to say anymore.

 

 

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

  
Later, in the car, Sam is driving. It’s a long drive through the rain, and silence for an hour. Dean is leaning his head against the cold window, eyes closed.

When the car stops at a traffic light under a bridge, Dean says, quiet, tired,

“I’m gonna find Cain.”

 

Nothing, for a long moment.

 

When the car starts moving again, Sam says, “Ok, Dean.”

The silence seems easier, after that. Dean doesn’t say that it’s probably too late, that it won’t help. After all, it can’t change what he’s always been.

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On this night, the ninth, when Dean falls asleep in the car and wakes up in the attic, he stays with Olivia. She doesn’t seem to hear him, whatever he says, only repeats what she’s always cried out, over and over again.

“It’s a choice!” she screams, clutching the dog tighter to her chest.

“Then how do I get out?!” he screams back, clutching at her arms, desperate.

She’s crying, tears sliding down her cheeks, her throat, like silver.

“You have to get out!” she pleads, “You have to get out of here!”

Dean stares at her, demands, “How?!”

She’s sobbing, shaking under his hands.

“Out! I want t-to get out of here!” Then she’s crying too hard to speak.

It’s the ninth night in a row, and Dean has been running, and scratching at the walls, but he’s never searched for the key.

 

Why didn’t he remember the key before?

 

He checks his pockets. He doesn’t have it.

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He tears through the place for hours, but he never finds the key. Except for Olivia’s crying, the attic has become as still as a grave. He never noticed it before. Never noticed, how dark the shadows are, how bare the corners. That’s when it hits him, that the attic is almost – empty now. All the stuff lying around, the drawers, the rugs, the kids toys, it’s all gone.

 

A fear runs through him that’s like ice in his veins, and he stumbles back to Olivia. The girl has sunk to her knees, her head bowed over Colette’s still body.

Dean hunches down, clutches her shoulders. “The key,” he says, his voice echoing eerily in the dark room, “the key, where is it?!”

Olivia lifts her head. She’s shivering, her voice trembling, “If you don’t have it, I don’t have it.”

Dean stares at her, uncomprehending. She bows her head and won’t look at him again.

 

As he let’s his hands fall away from her, it hits Dean, and he freezes.

Colette.

 

All this time, Olivia never moved away from her. She’s the only thing that neither changed, nor looked like it was real, like the actual Colette in the real Lacroix house.

Dean looks down, and even now, he can’t make out her face, not even the contours of her body. But somehow, from the first time he fell asleep and woke up here, he knew that it was her. He reaches out, but his fingers never meet skin, not even any resistance. Instead, he feels a warmth wash over him from his fingertips onward. It’s so gentle, so encompassing, that it hurts Dean, it burns in his arm and spreads pain all through his chest, tears blurring his vision, even as he leans further into the warmth.

“Please”, he rasps, choking, “please help me outta here, I want _out_.”

 

 

He falls forward. The attic around him dissipates into nothingness.

 

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

Dean wakes with his head still pressed against the car window, the glass now fogged over from his breath. The car isn’t moving. He cranes his head. Apparently they’re at a gas ‘n sip, Sam nowhere to be seen.

Dean digs his phone out of his pocket, thumbs through the speed dial until he comes to Cas’ number. He stares at it so long that the screen goes dark, he doesn’t even know why.

 

He can’t remember what he’d dreamed. It was the attic again, certainly, but something was off, this time. For the first time, he didn’t wake up, breathing hard, coated in sweat, his heart going a mile a minute.

 

Still – the skin of his hand is red-tinged, stinking of blood, and he tries not to look closely at it. His arm is throbbing, hurting, a pulse that’s beating in his head.

 

 

>

 

 

 

 

 

The next night, back at the bunker, Dean can’t sleep.

He is tired, his body feels heavy, in a way, but his legs are jittery, his senses alert like he expects the very walls to attack him any moment.

 

He opens his door, lies back down.

 

When that doesn’t help, he leaves his room, wanders through the corridors for hours. His heart is beating too fast, his head buzzing with white noise.

His hands are itching for something to pick up and hold, something to twist and throw and shatter.

He is still in the corridors, somewhere.

 

Dean runs.

 


End file.
